It has both modern commentaries and a translation of a traditional commentary (the Héshànggōng 河上公, ~50AD) with extensive translator's notes on those commentaries. It is a very good critical edition, but the scholar involved in the modern commentary might have an overly critical tone(!).

In reading the tao te ching I think that referring to commentaries too much tends to blunt the meaning.....because a meaning which one finds through ones own thoughts and contemplations will benefit one best. The eternal tao brings forth the 10,000 things with names but is itself nameless.
chownah

I think that one of the reasons why this parable of the man and the butterfly is so famous in East Asian Buddhism is because it can be construed to be about the artificiality of satkāyadṛṣṭi.

As you mention, there are differences between perception in dreams and perception in the world, such as the nature of the sense objects, or mental objects, one is interacting with.

But consider, have you ever had a dream in which you were an animal? Or perhaps you were simply "another person"?

I dreamt I was a cat one time. To the best of my memory, as reliably as I can recall the dream, I believe my mind did its best to guess what the existence, mentally and bodily, of a cat might be like.

When we are in dreams, we do not always have access to the reflective knowledge to realize that we are in a dream. Sometimes in dreams we are even different people. Sometimes in dreams we are the same person as we are when waking, but we act, behave, or perhaps think very differently.

Some people have dreams in which they go on murderous rampages, only to be horrified upon waking. They would never do that.

But in the dream, when Zhōu was a butterfly, Zhōu really was a butterfly inasmuch as his mind told him. He, surely, was also a sleeping man on a bed. But he was also a butterfly, albeit in mind/dream-only. Consider the ending line in light of that, "Zhōu and the butterfly however necessarily exist divided. This is called reification." The reification, the division, is perhaps between the sleeping man dreaming and his experience of dreams.

When we have a dream, "we" are really in that dream. We are really dreaming. As much as we are "really" driving a car or "really" sitting at a computer reading a web forum.

Thanks, I agree there is a reason this text is popular - even outside of Asia btw - and agree also on your reasonning, the interesting point is about the dreamer being a different person. Where there is something "complient" with buddhism : this Self is rather an idea amongts others. While i maintain my own ideas but we might understand each others better, so